Not so worried about country vs. country conflicts. Terrorism/asymmetric is bigger problem since cheap slaughterbots will proliferate. Hopefully intelligence agencies can deal with that more cheaply than putting in physical defenses and hard kill systems everywhere.
Still don’t expect much impact before we get STEM AI and everything goes off the rails.
Also without actual fights how would one side know the relative strength of their drone system
Relative strength is hard to gauge but getting reasonable perf/$ is likely easy. Then just compare budgets adjusted for corruption/Purchasing power parity/R&D amortisation.
Building an effective drone army is about tactical rock paper scissors and performance / $. Perf / $ emphasis makes live fire tests cheap. Live fire test data as baseline makes simulations accurate. RF/comms performance will be straightforward to model and military is actually putting work into cybersecurity because they’re not complete morons.
Add to that the usual espionage stuff and I expect govts to know what will work and what their enemies are doing.
Ukraine war was allegedly failure to predict the human element (will to fight) with big intelligence agencies having bad models. Drone armies don’t suffer from morale problems and match theoretical models better.
Not so worried about country vs. country conflicts. Terrorism/asymmetric is bigger problem since cheap slaughterbots will proliferate. Hopefully intelligence agencies can deal with that more cheaply than putting in physical defenses and hard kill systems everywhere.
Still don’t expect much impact before we get STEM AI and everything goes off the rails.
Relative strength is hard to gauge but getting reasonable perf/$ is likely easy. Then just compare budgets adjusted for corruption/Purchasing power parity/R&D amortisation.
Building an effective drone army is about tactical rock paper scissors and performance / $. Perf / $ emphasis makes live fire tests cheap. Live fire test data as baseline makes simulations accurate. RF/comms performance will be straightforward to model and military is actually putting work into cybersecurity because they’re not complete morons.
Add to that the usual espionage stuff and I expect govts to know what will work and what their enemies are doing.
Ukraine war was allegedly failure to predict the human element (will to fight) with big intelligence agencies having bad models. Drone armies don’t suffer from morale problems and match theoretical models better.